


Wet Gold

by unkissed



Series: The Color of Deception [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First Time, M/M, Teacher-Student Relationship, sex and angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 11:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5089844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unkissed/pseuds/unkissed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Sirius Potter does indeed bleed gold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wet Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Gratitude and jazz-handed emoji's go out to my partner in literary crime, ColorfulStabwound.
> 
> For James, the Lionhearted King

“James…,” I started, sounding more needy than I’d intended. 

 

It didn’t matter that I was using his given name in an attempt at austerity.  The single syllable word came out all wrong – not a hard enough _J_ at the beginning and too sibilant of an _S_ at the end – not the way Harry would say his name, and certainly not the way his god brother should.

 

I pursed my lips.

 

Jamie was tugging up the front of his tee shirt before I could tell him it was a stupid thing to do.  Not that I would have said it in those precise, blunt words – that’s his department.  

 

“You didn’t have to… I could’ve…,” I struggled to speak in the wake of Jamie’s drenched shirt hitting the floorboards of my dormitory room with a wet splat.

 

“I know I didn’t have to come. But I’m here, so…,” Jamie shrugged casually before turning away to look out the window.

 

It was March in Oxford, too cold and not cold enough for straightforward precipitation.  The traffic signals on the other side of the frosted glass window seemed to twinkle, red to green, like Christmas lights left up too long, as sleet fell from the black sky - wet and heavy like the shirt it had ruined, wet and heavy like the secret that seeped out of my skin and soaked my bedclothes at night.

 

“Your weather sucks, Teddy,” he scoffed, as if it was entirely my fault.

 

“Perhaps it’s your timing that sucks,” I joked. I knew I shouldn’t. Any sort of levity would only encourage him, and it was bad enough that he was a half-naked sixth-year Gryffindor in my University dorm room.

 

He gave a quiet, faintly amused sort of snort. “Story of our lives,” he mumbled, then stared off into the blurry night outside the window as the traffic signal turned from yellow to red and held fast.

 

He stretched wearily with a dramatic yawn and brought his hands up to the back of his head, where he curled his fingers into the hair that was growing too long for his mum’s liking.  The subtle musculature of his arms and his shoulders glistening dully beneath the low lamp light made my throat tighten. The nape of his neck and his back were wet and I followed a rivulet of melted sleet streak down from his hairline, down his spine, and I imagined the cold droplet mingling with the sweat on his skin – I could taste the winter brine on my tongue when I screwed my eyes shut to try to clear the desire from my head. 

 

It was in vain, of course, for desire like this does not originate from the mind, but from somewhere more corporeal. I wanted to know his skin in ways that I’d never known before – in ways that _nobody_ had ever known before.

 

Jamie wore a thin chain that clung to him wetly. It looked like a gilded slit across the base of his neck, as if a surgically thin knife had sliced through his skin, revealing that he did indeed bleed gold.  I didn’t remember him ever wearing jewelry, and didn’t have the verbal capacity at that moment to ask him about it.

 

There were more important questions I needed to ask anyway.

 

“Why’d you come all this way? What’s so important that you couldn’t just fire-call?” I wanted to sound belligerent and outraged that he did some creative (i.e., illegal) floo-jumping to get from Hogsmeade to Oxford in the dead of night, but my vocal delivery betrayed me yet again.   “I’m sure Headmistress McGonagall would’ve let you use the fire in her office if it was an emergency,” I said softly.

 

James heaved a long, deep sigh that did horrible, i.e., wonderful, things to the muscles in his back.  He dropped his arms and shoved his hands in the pockets of his tight, wet jeans.  “That’s the thing, Teddy,” he began as he turned around to look at me with his storm blue eyes that shone with less light than a seventeen-year-old’s eyes should.

 

I already knew what he was going to say and I spun on my bare feet to sit down heavily on the bed.  I hugged my legs to my chest, buried my face into the flannel of my pajamas, and swore weakly.  “ _Fuck_ … When?”

 

“Couple hours ago.”

 

Just from the sound of his voice, I could tell what Jamie was doing, even with my crying eyes hidden in the fold of my arms. He was probably staring at me, unwaveringly, in that unabashed and entitled way that only Jamie can get away with. I could never hide anything from him, no matter how hard I tried.  He’d always look at the parts of me that would make others glance away uncomfortably – like staring at a slug sizzling on the pavement, entirely capable of doing something about it, but understanding it was beyond help.

 

“I would’ve come sooner, but it was more difficult than expected to sneak out of the school,” James offered more quietly than I’d ever heard him speak in a long time, “Dad was there and he would’ve, you know… noticed.”  He sounded almost apologetic.  The thing about Jamie is that he’ll never say he’s sorry for anything because he never really is.

 

I sniffled through an outpouring of tears and spoke into the darkness of my folded arms. “Thank you.  I’m glad you came to tell me.  You didn’t have to, and I appreciate it.”

 

I felt the mattress sink in next to me and heard the old springs creak loudly.  I felt Jamie close to me – somehow concurrently emanating the cold of the wet Oxford night he’d walked through to get here, and the heat of his warm blooded-body. I felt his arm drape across the back of my shoulders, and his lips press against the top of my head. I sighed around a bout of tears, relieved that Jamie was kissing me and holding me like a brother. But there was a tiny, disappointed, needy ache that originated from deep inside my chest, which I could not swallow further down.

 

Jamie may not have been one to say he is sorry, but he always found ways to express it when entirely warranted, at least for me. “I know you were close,” he whispered, and I could feel the warmth of his breath on my scalp. I faintly wondered if the blue of my hair had deepened enough to turn black.

 

 

When you grow up without your mother, you find a surrogate wherever you go, or you just become cold and angry and bitter. I never enjoyed being cold and angry and bitter the way tragic figures seem to do so in books and muggle films. One never has to look very hard for comfort, because motherly-types with bleeding hearts can’t leave an orphan unfed or un-hugged.  I have Gran. I have Molly.  I have Ginny.  I _had_ McGonagall.

 

But she was more to me than all of my mother-figures put together.   She was something to aspire to.   She’d always taught us that Transfiguration was an exact science, but she performed it like art. She took me under her wing and showed me I could do more than just fly, I could perform aerial masterpieces with my magic.

 

A large part of my grief over her passing was completely selfish.  I wanted her to see me graduate from the Institute for Advanced Wizardry at Oxford as the youngest doctorate in Transfiguration since she had achieved the honor. I wanted to see the gleam of pride in her eyes as she looked down at me, despite my taller stature, from above the rim of her spectacles.  And she would have done so in just three months, had her illness not taken her. It wasn’t a surprise – I’d visited her sickbed over Christmas holidays, and I knew her condition was terminal.

 

I thought I had emotionally prepared myself to lose my mentor, my idol.  Clearly, I hadn’t been.

 

 

I shuddered beneath the weight of Jamie’s love and turned to press my face against his chest as if we’d gone back in time fifteen years and reversed roles.  He smelled like spring.  Wet, like melting snow upon the moors of Godric’s Hollow.  Wet, like sweat and teenage musk and sex.  Wet, like the brine of tears and helplessness.  And all I wanted in that moment was to sink into this beautiful boy, become saturated with the wet heat of his flesh, and find my way home.

 

I cried in the damp cocoon of his arms for what could have been minutes or hours.  I cried to mourn the moments of solitary triumph that I’d never share with those who inspired it – my mother, my father, Minerva McGonagall.  Triumphant moments I knew James would have no shortage of. I could have felt jealous of him. I could have felt bitter. But I never have, and so I didn’t then.

 

I knew what I wanted to live for now – not to honor my parent’s memory, not to make McGonagall proud of her little protege. It should have been a happy, liberating realization, but it was unbearably crippling.

 

I wanted him - more than I ever had and ever should - this boy burgeoning into manhood in the springtime of his life, nearly at full bloom.

 

 

I kept on crying as I mourned for what could never be.

 

He fell asleep with his arms around me. It reminded me that it wasn’t the first time, though it was the first time in over a decade, just before I’d left for Hogwarts for the first time.  In the morning, I found that our fetal positions on the bed had somehow switched in our sleep.  When my eyes opened with the dawn, I saw the back of Jamie’s neck and the gold chain glinting in the sun that had melted the storm.  As he slept, I inched forward, careful not to wake him, and I kissed the nape of his neck. I felt the heat of his skin and the burn of hot gold on my lips. 

 

I whispered _I love you_ and I mourned the loss of those words as they died on my lips forever.

 

 

 

What I didn’t know then was that the scorch of flesh-heated gold would burn itself into me less than a year later, in the dead of winter in the Scottish Highlands. 

 

On Jamie’s eighteenth birthday, I gave him a gold charm in the shape of a tiny gilt crown and told him he was my lionhearted king.

 

I wanted him to wear the charm on his chain. He took the gold chain between his teeth and teased me with a smirk - like a fallen angel consuming his own halo. He gazed up at me with the tempestuous eyes, not of a boy, but of a man on fire. 

 

“Is this my coronation?” he asked with the sort of lilting, smug drawl that he knew could twist my insides and set me ablaze.

 

“Let me put it on you,” I said, smiling and blushing hard, my hair turning a pink hue to match my cheeks.

 

He turned around and allowed me to unclasp his gold chain necklace that he had never taken off since Ginny had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday last year.  It was a traditional gift of something gold for Jamie’s coming-of-age and the gold was impregnated with her protective magic. 

 

I inwardly noted that his hair was getting long again as I removed the chain.  While I was wheedling the tiny charm onto the thread of gold, Jamie was pulling off his shirt. I didn’t stop him. We’d been doing this for two months now – sneaking around Hogwarts, stealing kisses and heated moments in my office or my professor’s quarters, behind locked doors and silencing charms. We were beyond propriety at this stage of the game, with the freedom that a nearly empty castle could provide over Christmas holidays.

 

I looped the chain around his neck, clasped it closed, and glanced over his shoulder to admire the gold crown glinting upon his pale skin. The charm, however miniscule, weighed down the chain enough so that it hung lower on his chest than before. The crown rested on his sternum, next to his heart.

 

Jamie raised his arm to hook his fingers behind my neck and I folded myself around him from behind.  He wore me like a king’s ostentatious cloak made from the body of a rare animal.

 

“I love it,” he whispered, as he fingered the gold crown admiringly.

 

“I love _you_ ,” I whispered behind his ear, and felt him shudder against me as if I could really disarm him with three words.  And maybe I had.

 

He sprawled himself naked upon the bed in my neat, private rooms – in blinding full bloom despite the winter that roared outside the castle walls.  Jamie was an Adonis hewn from gold and he fucking knew it.  This fact only made me want him more. 

 

The crown rose and fell upon the undulating waves of his deep, languid breaths as he watched me slowly divesting myself of clothes to join him.  I worshiped my glorious king with my mouth and moaned with ravenous need as he anointed my tongue with hot brine.  The crown jumped upon his chest with every pleasured gasp and needy twitch.

 

He beckoned me home, so hot and wet and perfect, deep inside of him.  Upon the first, world-shattering breech, I cried into his skin and the glistening beads of his sweat had a natural affinity for my tears.  I kissed his neck and tasted the metallic tang of wet gold.

 

The hitching of his erratic breaths grew more manic and shallow, and I worried that I was pushing him further than he could handle. I knew that, no matter how careful one was, the first time always hurt the most.

 

I pulled back and looked down at him. His hair was wet with sweat and clung messily to his forehead.  I brushed his fringe aside and saw that he was crying too.  But he smiled at me, and it was gold sunlight filtering through breaking storm clouds, and I knew his tears were coming from a very different place than mine were.

 

“I love you,” he whispered upon a quivering exhale.

 

The adoration in his eyes was so complete that it frightened me and only made me cry harder against the crook of his neck as I delved in deep and came hard inside him.  My hair screamed purple adulations that my lips could not properly express. My fingers tightened around his already-leaking arousal and it took just a kiss and a deft twist of my wrist to make him come with my name on his tongue.  After, we collapsed into one another, and as we rested in a tangle of limbs, I knew Jamie had seeped into the pores of my skin to infiltrate my bones. I would never be able to shake my hunger for him – he had become a part of me.

 

 

By the summer, I forced myself to believe that I could forget the taste of his golden skin and the honey-toned light of his hair in the sun as he flew to unfathomable heights upon his racing broom. I would let the words of love die upon my lips again.  I would deny that it was ever Jamie that I was living for.

 

Because James Sirius Potter really is made of gold; too brilliant to be kept selfishly hidden within a heart-shaped box inside my chest. 


End file.
